I meet Vera and Stan Caley, both 81, in their flat in Bethnal Green, along with their friend Kathy Hempsted, 84. All were evacuated at the start of the war, and Stan spent much of it in Swindon, but Vera and Kathy hated being away and quickly came back. "My mother didn't really want to part with me," says Vera. She and her brother went to Somerset briefly, wrote to their mother to say how unhappy they were, and were brought home. Kathy, too, loathed being with an elderly couple in Oxford, and begged to be brought back. It was a dangerous choice, since Bethnal Green, where their families lived, was just a few miles from the London docks – the first target in September 1940.

"The start was a Saturday afternoon [September 7, the very first day of the blitz] when they bombed the docks and set light to them," Kathy recalls. "When it got darker, the whole of the sky was red, and there was thick smoke. That went on for hours and hours."

"It was the smell of the smoke more than anything," says Vera. "I remember going to the pictures with one of the lads here, and as we came back you could still hear bits of shrapnel falling. By the time we got home the all-clear had gone, and we went up on the roof of the flats; looking across, you could see the orange flames and the thick smoke. It was spreading, and this lad turned round and said: 'If that goes round there, we'd be encircled in fire.' That was the first time in the war I was frightened."

Vera and her family used a shelter under the flats when the bombing was at its height, but there were also blast shelters on the streets – although, since these were used as latrines, they were a last resort. The underground, too, was not to their taste. "I didn't like it down the tube," says Kathy. "It was horrible and musty. We used to shelter under a church." But she says no shelter offered total security, and recalls a direct hit on a one nearby that killed many of those inside, including a group from a wedding reception. "There was one woman who came to live in the flats just after the war, and she'd lost six of her sisters and brothers down there," says Vera. "She never really recovered. She tried to black it out and stop herself remembering."

Vera says it was surprising how quickly you adjusted to being bombed. "The first time you heard that thump it frightened you. But after a time you got so used to hearing it that it meant nothing." Kathy says they were more frightened of the V1 and V2 rockets at the end of the war, because you never heard them coming. Did they regret coming back? "No," says Vera. "I knew that if I was with my mum, no matter what happened I would be safe. She used to run all the way home [from her job in a factory] at dinner time just to make sure gran had given us something to eat. As long as mum was there, we didn't give a damn about dad. He usually took shelter in the pub."

Vera insists that the cliched view of chirpy Cockneys banding together in the face of attack is accurate. "Everything was shared, especially when somebody's house got hit. You've never seen so many crowds. If someone wanted help, it was there for you." "All these jokes about cups of sugar are true," adds Kathy. "You could borrow anything."

Both Vera's and Kathy's blocks were damaged, but not so badly that they had to move out. In fact, for Vera the greatest tragedy came two years later. A cousin and her two children were killed in the Bethnal Green tube disaster of March 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death in a stampede caused by a false alarm. Her cousin had just spent the afternoon at the pictures with the children, and got caught up in the panic on the way home. "It was an ordinary day," says Vera. And the unluckiest of deaths.

Footage shot by Alfred Coucher, wartime mayor and chief air raid warden of Marylebone, west London. It has been released by Westminster city council after lying unseen in the Coucher family's attic for 70 years